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Whoa! WaPo Tries To Ease Website Navigation

WaPo is apparently trying to ease your navigating woes when searching the Washington behemoth’s website. But you made need an ice pack and a sick day for this one.

For our purposes, there are obvious parts of the site that are vital to our interests — namely Ezzy Klein, Reliable Sources (sometimes UnReliable Sources), Chris Cillizza‘s “Worst Week in Washington” feature, Animal Watch and Erik Wemple’s reported opinion media blog. It’s still unclear why Klein’s blogpire (a new way of saying empire) is under the “news” section and not opinion or Democratic consulting. And finding “Animal Watch” was a complete lost cause that will perhaps require an ordinary Google search or purchasing the print version daily. But Wemple’s blog may have confused the wonky powers that be considering that it’s both opinion and a blog. So what do they do? They stick it in the “blogs” section, which seems logical enough, except you then must click on “opinions” and then scroll down through a strange and confusing series of options that includes “Jump to a Section” — huh? — business blogs and columns, car blogs and columns, kicking tires, Post User Polls, Entertainment blogs, Celebrity blogs and bizarre patches of white space. Keep holding your breath. After campus overload, class struggle and crime scene, Ask Fedcoach and For God’s Sake and Under God you ahhh…reach Opinion Blogs and Opinion Columns, which is where they stuffed him.

Before discovering this obviously easier way to reach his blog and hunting Wemple’s blog down for 15 minutes, we typed his name into their search engine and clicked on one of his pieces which led us to his space. Needless to say, this hardly fits the one-click experience they promised.

Wemple and others should raise a little holy hell about all this. Clearly they still have a few kinks to work out.